Long story short, wahcade was not launching games. It would simply launch mame into it's (mame's) internal menu. I suspected that the rom name wasn't being supplied to the emulator because the emulator.log file only showed:

So, I guess my question is... what did I do wrong in the overall installation and how can I better help the community by submitting this as a bug fix? I used the installation instructions found at http://wahki.mameau.com/index.php?title ... stallation and used "bzr branch lp:wahcade"

Thanks in advance, and thank you to the development team for contributing their own private time to keeping this afloat.

Indeed, that's what happened. I followed the instructions here: http://www.anti-particle.com/wahcade_quick.shtml , but veered off course and set the application parameters in there, but omitted the [name] field. Since we're writing this off as user configuration, which it is, perhaps you might want to add a validation check on that field, so when it is not blank, that it requires [name] ? Just a suggestion.

Thanks for the suggestion, my initial thought is that the [name] code is not guaranteed in all configs, nor is anything really. This is what gives Wah!Cade it's flexibility. Therefore there is some ownness on the users to have a base understanding of their required outcomes. Whilst effort has been made by the userbase to simplify the setup (Wah!Ki, ini thread, pre-packages inis), Wah!Cade is far from a turnkey solution (as some may want it). This of course limits the adoption somewhat of the project; but in that, for those that persevere the satisfaction is unmatched

Will think on your suggestion some more whilst i get back to playing around with the code.